Case Studies

Appliance Test Stand Support

Posted in Consumer Goods, Manufacturing Automation and Intelligence, Siemens PLC, Test & Measurement Automation, Test Stand

Summary

DMC’s client in the appliance industry had an existing test stand for validating the operation and safety of their assembled products. Due to changes in their products' features and design, several updates to the test stand were required to maintain the operation of their test equipment. DMC reviewed the changes to their product and successfully updated all parts of the test stand to support the new assembly lines.

Solution

DMC’s client had a test stand designed to evaluate several products in the current line. The test stand used a Siemens SoftPLC as well as a custom DLL driver to allow communicating with the appliances under test using its diagnostic port. With the addition of new products to their factory, additional tests and modifications to existing communication parameters were required.

DMC reviewed the existing design and requirements for additional tests and worked with the client to implement them on their test stands. DMC updated the PLC test sequence and interface to include the additional tests.  Additionally, DMC upgraded the communication DLL integrated into the SoftPLC to fix several stability issues when communicating with the appliance under test.

The client was able to successfully integrate the new products into their process as well as improve testing efficiency.

Customer Benefits

  • Support for additional products
  • Stability improvements
  • Additional configurability

Technologies

  • Siemens WinAC RTK
  • Siemens WinAC ODK
  • DBus Communication
  • C++ driver development